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After Washoe County District Court Judge Scott Freeman issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Uber from operating statewide on Tuesday, the controversial ridesharing company decided to temporarily pull out of the Silver State.

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"William," presumably a company spokesman, wrote in a late Wednesday blog post: "beginning tonight, nearly 1,000 jobs disappeared in Nevada and those residents lost their ability to earn a living. But, rest assured, Uber is in this for the long-term and we are committed to the people of the Silver State."

After a rapid expansion worldwide, Uber has been butting heads with local regulators across North America and in Europe, where some authorities have found that the company is behaving like a taxi company and therefore should comply with taxi law. Uber wants regulators to bend local law to accommodate its business model. Most famously, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates taxis in the Golden State, created an entirely new class of transit for Uber and its competitors.

For its part, Uber generally maintains that it is not a transportation company, but rather a tech company that simply enables ridesharing—even though it pretty much looks, feels, and acts like a taxi company.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar